by Barry Miles
Burroughs was buried on August 7 in the Burroughs family plot at Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, block 37, lot 3938, next to his grandfather, his mother, his father, and Uncle Horace, the morphine addict. The grandfather’s name, William Seward Burroughs, was the only one on the mausoleum. Patti Smith flew in, taking a cab to the graveyard straight from the airport, but when she reached the gates she insisted on walking to the grave instead of driving. It is a large graveyard so the burial was delayed while everyone waited for her to arrive. The grave was filled in using a backhoe and floral wreaths piled on top. There was talk of firing a single-volley salute over the grave, but they decided against it and instead José Ferez, Fred Aldrich, and David Bradshaw just posed with guns for photographs.
Later James Grauerholz had the names of all the interred Burroughs family members carved on the obelisk and installed two Barre gray granite benches for visitors to rest upon. He applied for special dispensation to erect a footstone at Bill’s feet. It reads, “William Seward Burroughs. Feb 5, 1914–Aug 2, 1997. American Writer.”
Endwords
William S. Burroughs was not only a novelist; he produced a huge body of work that is best understood seen as a whole. He was an essayist on a wide range of subjects from revolutionary techniques in warfare to the antics of cats, the author of book reviews, humor, travel writing, studies of psychic phenomena, and investigations into methods of self-improvement from Scientology to the theories of Wilhelm Reich. He wrote poems, belles lettres, rock ’n’ roll lyrics, and the libretto for an opera. He made more records than most rock groups and appeared in dozens of films and documentaries. Inevitably, given such a prodigious output, his audience is varied, and people see him from different viewpoints according to their interests. Everyone has their own William S. Burroughs. A horror-film fan who encountered him via David Cronenberg knows a different Burroughs than the avant-garde scholar who first saw him onstage with John Cage.
He is seen as a great writer, a junkie, a murderer, a misogynist, a member of the original Beat Generation, a mentor to the youth movement of the sixties, a political philosopher, a psychic, a leading gay activist, an artist, a gun advocate, an actor, a humorist, and a “good ’ol boy.” The Burroughs brand comes in many varieties.
His writing methods were often unorthodox: his correspondence with Allen Ginsberg produced his first four books. His experiments with cut-ups and textural juxtaposition using columns and scrapbooks led him far from writing into recording-tape cut-ups; photographic collages, photo series, and pattern-making; films using extreme jump cuts and actual cut-ups; shotgun sculptures and paintings, all of which relate to and reference each other.
Burroughs was aware that writers can have an image problem, and that it was not good to be typecast, like an actor always playing the same role. He felt that Hemingway had been consumed by the least interesting aspect of his work. He told Gerard Malanga, “I feel that his work suffered from that. So, finally you get, there is nothing there but the image: Poppa Hemingway. […] The whole matter of image is, I think, a very dangerous thing for a writer: too much image. […] I think that any writer is to a certain extent typecast by his choice of subject matter. Like Genet is typecast as the saintly convict. And Graham Greene, of course, it’s the old whiskey priest. Uh, of course, I’m no longer a drug addict.”1 But Burroughs bowed to the inevitable. He realized the importance of promotion in the modern publishing environment and adopted the role imposed on him by his fans, the godfather, éminence grise, the old junkie priest, writer, and sage.
Though Burroughs did not deliver a fatal blow to the bourgeois novel, he certainly gave it a good kicking. Without Junky, Scottish author Alexander Trocchi could not have written Cain’s Book; in London J. G. Ballard would not have written Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition,2 or his experimental short stories. Ballard always acknowledged his enormous debt to Burroughs. In the sixties and seventies there was even an International Cut-Up literary movement, made up mostly by German and French writers inspired by, and often writing in collaboration with, Burroughs, sometimes in English: Carl Weissner, Jürgen Ploog, Harold Norse, Jörg Fauser, Claude Pélieu, Mary Beach, Alfred Behrens, Walter Hartmann, Jan Herman, Hammond Guthrie, and Gerhard Hanak. From the seventies onward Burroughs can be seen as a major influence on avant-garde writing from Will Self to Kathy Acker and Dennis Cooper, Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius novels, Ronald Sukenick, David Wojnarowicz, and Iain Sinclair. He is buried in the DNA of punk and post-punk writers such as Stewart Home, Terry Wilson, Genesis P-Orridge, Keith Seward, and David Britton.
Another, far more popular genre heavily influenced by Burroughs is cyberpunk, the eighties “post-sci-fi” label used to describe writers such as Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Randy Rucker, John Shirley, Neal Stephenson, and, most famously, William Gibson, whose novel Neuromancer (1984) introduced cyberpunk to a mass audience. In 2005 Gibson wrote, “Burroughs was then as radical a literary man as the world had to offer, and in my opinion, he still holds the title. Nothing, in all my experience of literature since, has ever been quite as remarkable for me, and nothing has ever had as strong an effect on my sense of the sheer possibilities of writing.”3
Burroughs’s influence extended into music. He gave a number of bands their names: Steely Dan, Soft Machine, Insect Trust. The author’s favorite is Matching Mole, the band that Robert Wyatt formed after leaving Soft Machine. It is a phonetic rendering of the French for Soft Machine, La machine molle. Paul McCartney was sufficiently impressed by his conversations with Bill to put him on the sleeve of Sgt. Pepper’s. The Rolling Stones fêted him. After meeting Burroughs in November 1973, David Bowie used the cut-up technique to write the lyrics for Diamond Dogs and the 1977 German albums Low and “Heroes.” Bowie stated that he got “the shape and the look of what Ziggy and the Spiders were going to become” from The Wild Boys and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), based on the 1962 Anthony Burgess novel. “They were both powerful pieces of work, especially the marauding boy gangs of Burroughs’ Wild Boys with their bowie knives. I got straight on to that.”4 Jon Savage observed, “Within five years of Ziggy, the punks were enacting The Wild Boys on the streets of London, Manchester, Liverpool and other cities in Britain. […] Few could have foreseen in 1974 a youth culture that took many of its cues from a figure like Burroughs, but Bowie saw it and helped to bring it about.”5 Musicians like Joe Strummer and Mick Jones of the Clash were interested in Burroughs’s work—Strummer visited with him in New York, and Burroughs was so pleased with the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” that he sent them a congratulatory telegram. Thus Burroughs is sometimes dubbed the “Godfather of Punk.”
Iggy Pop, the true grandfather of punk, also claims Burroughs as an influence. The title song from his 1977 album Lust for Life has a reference to Johnny Yen in the first line (from The Naked Lunch), there’s a reference to the “flesh machine,” and the line about “hypnotizing chickens” apparently refers to something in The Ticket That Exploded. Burroughs’s influence on punk was enormous, particularly in the United States, but more as a mentor and inspiration than artistic influence. They felt he gave them permission to behave that way, and some, like Patti Smith and Chris Stein, became friends. A new generation of musicians—Michael Stipe, Kurt Cobain, Sonic Youth—all came to visit. However, not everyone loved him. A radical feminist group in Toronto called Bitch Nation brought out a fanzine called Double Bill, dedicated to praising actor William “Cannon” Conrad, and condemning William Burroughs (and including the odd swipe at Allen Ginsberg as well).6
His influence extends into other genres: Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy), Alex Cox (Repo Man), and Donald Cammell and Nick Roeg (Performance) have all acknowledged his influence, and The Third Mind is used by many young filmmakers as a textbook for fresh ways of approaching their material. Some say the space cantina in Star Wars would not have been possible were it not for Hassan’s Rumpus Room in The Naked Lunch.
Burroughs was not writing only for artistic reasons.
He intended his books to have political impact; to directly confront the agents that control people’s lives. In the tradition of Orwell or Sartre he was writing to free the mind from all the strictures by which society enslaves it: family values, bourgeois morality, nationalism, and religion. “Deconditioning means the removal of all automatic reactions deriving from past conditioning—all automatic reactions to Queen, Country, Pope, President, Generalissimo, Allah, Christ, Fidel Castro, the Communist Party, the CIA. […] When automatic reactions are no longer operative you are in a condition to make up your mind.”7 His influence on the youth movement of the sixties was considerable, particularly when he placed himself firmly on their side by appearing in the front row alongside Ginsberg and Genet at a march during the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention demonstrations.
Although he was very much in the American tradition, to be defined on his tombstone as an “American writer” would have been antithetical to Burroughs, who always rejected ideas of nationalism and patriotism. In many ways he was archetypically American: the dry, flat, clipped syllables, like a prewar newscaster, betrayed his midwestern origins, but with a mid-Atlantic timbre. His actual speech was tempered with Anglicisms and forties hipster slang. It was this mixture of precise, cultured Harvard learning and bizarre street talk that made his spoken delivery so fascinating. Many people have said they never fully understood Burroughs until they heard his voice. Burroughs has been compared to the misanthropic onscreen persona of W. C. Fields, and they had much in common: a contempt for women and dogs and a fondness for alcohol and absurd humor. Burroughs never saw himself as an expatriate. As he said, “I was back for brief times in the States, but from 1948 on I was pretty much out of the States [until 1974]. I never thought of myself as particularly in exile because there was nothing to be exiled from. One can hardly say that one is in exile from the United States as a whole. I had no sense of home at all. Where is home? I never thought of St. Louis as being home.”
Many of his friends commented on how Anglicized Burroughs always was, with his egg cups and Senior Service cigarettes, his gourmet taste, classical learning, formal attire, and old-fashioned manners. The comparison between Burroughs and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes goes back as far as 1944, when Kerouac and Ginsberg first suggested it: the aquiline face, thin lips, the “tall, spare figure,” the long silences. They both injected cocaine, both were armed, both carried an armed shooting stick, both kept extensive scrapbooks. Both were masters of disguise and immune (almost) to the charms of women. And both had their Watsons: Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Ian Sommerville, Antony Balch, and James Grauerholz all served that role.
Burroughs was never an expat like Paul Bowles, purposely making a life in another country, though he did appear to attempt it in Tangier with Ian Sommerville in 1963 and in Duke Street Saint James’s, London, in 1966, again with Ian. For most of his life Burroughs was peripatetic, at home in a hotel room and content as long as a decent breakfast and a selection of good restaurants was available. He had no real home until he bought a house in Lawrence, Kansas, at the age of sixty-nine.
The role of drugs in Burroughs’s life cannot be overemphasized. From the mid-forties, when his nostalgie de la boue led him to the criminal circles where he became addicted to morphine, he was involved in the drug subculture. Though not always addicted, he was rarely sober from then on: all his books were written on marijuana, which he used throughout his lifetime, and/or opiates. Despite his frequent claims to the contrary, much of the original material in The Naked Lunch was written while he was heavily addicted to Eukodol, a form of morphine, and everything written after his return to the United States in 1974 was written on opiates; he switched to the methadone program for the last seventeen years of his life. This was in contradiction to his previous position, when he said, “I’ve always maintained that any sort of opiate is contraindicated for creative work. It makes you less aware of your surroundings. But I made copious notes over the years.”8 At the time of writing no one has yet done a serious study of what must surely be the biggest influence of all upon his work: the different drugs he was taking when he wrote his books. This would have to include alcohol. He drank a good deal, sometimes lapsing into alcoholism. Drugs were an enormously important part of his life: they were an all-consuming interest and also the subject of much of his writing. He was ambivalent about them, on and off, for and against, for much of his life, but in old age he felt that becoming a junkie was the best thing he ever did, because without it he would not have written The Naked Lunch or encountered the demimonde of underground characters that populate his work.
Burroughs did not have a happy life: he was plagued by loneliness and lack of love, racked with guilt, not just over the death of Joan, but for his neglect of friends and family. “You never loved anybody except your cats, your Ruski and Spooner and Calico… Mother, Ian, Brion, Antony Balch?”9 he wrote in Last Words. “Mother, Dad, Mort, Billy—I failed them all—”10 Many people have commented how much Burroughs changed after moving to Kansas: old age softened him; for the first time he had a home, a support system of friends, fame and recognition, a regular supply of drugs and his cats. Although he had always been a great raconteur among close friends, his reputation in London and Paris among those who did not know him very well was for his long, icy silences. His publishers Maurice Girodias, John Calder, and Barney Rosset all commented upon this. In Kansas, however, he became positively garrulous, dispensing pearls of wisdom to his friends and visitors, most of whom had received them before, many times. To his friends in Lawrence he was an inspirational presence. TP commented, “William had a lot of advice for a young man. […] He wasn’t a softy but he was really warm. And he was just so likable. Everybody I know liked him.”11 His manners were endearing. Like W. H. Auden, Burroughs made a point of escorting visitors to their carriage and would stand on the porch, waving goodbye. TP: “You know it fostered the warmest feelings, when you’re driving away, and you see him up there in silhouette waving at you.” As he grew older his support team of carers closed ranks and became very protective of him, sometimes warding off strangers and celebrity seekers, enabling him to write and paint without interruption. He continued to shoot and to write his journals, but age took its toll and he became increasingly stooped and frail, a slight figure in overlarge clothing. El hombre invisible was becoming invisible, but his mental agility was unimpaired. Increasingly, Bill’s consciousness became a flickering collage of memories and dreams as friends and sets flashed across his mind:
White green and light blue filigrees of coral shot through with specks and streaks of red looking up to Brion’s picture there is Paul Bowles’ face very old, very petulant finally upside down. Walk once again out of the pub where I talked to Tim Willoughby across the street to Lancaster Gate and downstairs. Ian looks up. “I just washed my hair.” We are the language the letters disintegrate, fade to gray shadows. Doctor Zeit. Sunlight on Moscow Road where the Greek restaurant was. Mullet and raisins. Little pieces of London. The ducks. Old biddies feeding sparrows in the air. Ian’s superimposed picture. “What a beautiful sinister place.” Brion exclaimed. David Budd and the metal sculptures. Back in the ghost pub with the ghost of swinging London. You can see through it.12
Since his death, interest in Burroughs’s work has greatly increased. There have been major museum exhibitions worldwide of his paintings: a three-part show in London at Riflemaker in 2005; a sellout show at the Stellan Holm Gallery in New York; in 2012 a show at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, organized by Udo Breger entitled The Name Is Burroughs—Expanded Media assembled sixteen hundred items not only by Burroughs but portraits of him and works inspired by him; that same year the Vienna Kunsthalle put on Cut-ups Cut-ins Cut-outs. Die Kunst des William S. Burroughs, featuring his manuscripts and scrapbooks. There have been documentary films, spoken-word recordings, and academic conferences: the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Naked Lunch was celebrated by conferences in Paris, held at the University of London Institute, Pa
ris, and in New York, hosted by Columbia University, New York University, and the School of Visual Arts. Other celebrations in 2009 were held in Chicago, London, Bristol, Lawrence, Sydney, San Francisco, and Venice, California. Burroughs’s books remain in print and new translations continue to be published. At the time of writing there have been more than two dozen academic studies of his work, and the RealityStudio.org website provides an ongoing forum on all aspects of his life and work.
Burroughs’s work, far from being dated, is more relevant now than ever in the fight for freedom of thought as governments increase electronic surveillance of their citizens, restrict freedom of speech, and the huge global corporations take over the planet. Inspector Lee is still needed in the fight against the Nova Mob.
Notes
Acknowledgments
1. Audio Research Editions ARECD301, Liverpool, 2007.
Introduction
1. This account of Burroughs’s sweat lodge experience draws heavily upon the conversations that Allen Ginsberg held with Burroughs between April 17 and 22, 1992, immediately following the event, and are taken from a raw transcript of the tapes sent to the author by Ginsberg at the time. Some of the background and context is taken from the article “Exorcising Burroughs” by Allen Ginsberg in Observer Magazine, April 26, 1992.
